buffets, cabinets, Negro page
boys, elaborately painted and gilt, and carved mirror frames, the chief
ornaments of which were cupids and foliage.

Italian carving has always been free and spirited, the figures have never
been wanting in grace, and, though by comparison with the time of the
Renaissance there is a great falling off, still, the work executed in
Italy during the present century has been of considerable merit as regards
ornament, though this has been overdone. In construction and joinery,
however, the Italian work has been very inferior. Cabinets of great
pretension and elaborate ornament, inlaid perhaps with ivory, lapislazuli,
or marbles, are so imperfectly made that one would think ornament, and
certainly not durability, had been the object of the producer.

In Antwerp, Brussels, Liege, and other Flemish Art centres, the School of
Wood Carving, which came in with the Renaissance, appears to have been
maintained with more or less excellence. With the increased quality of the
carved woodwork manufactured, there was a proportion of ill-finished and
over-ornamented work produced; and although, as has been before observed,
the manufacture of cheap marqueterie in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities
was bringing the name of Dutch furniture into ill-repute--still, so far as
the writer's observations have gone, the Flemish wood-carver appears to
have been, at the time now under consideration, ahead of his fellow
craftsmen in Europe; and when in the ensuing chapter we come to notice
some of the representative exhibits in the great International Competition
of 1851, it will be seen that the Antwerp designer and carver was
certainly in the foremost rank.

In Austria, too, some good cabinet work was being carried out, M.
Leistler, of Vienna, having at the time a high reputation.

In Paris the house of Fourdinois was making a name which, in subsequent
exhibitions, we shall see took a leading place amongst the designers and
manufacturers of decorative furniture.

England, it has been observed, was suffering from languor in Art industry.
The excellent designs of the Adams and their school, which obtained early
in the century, had been supplanted, and a meaningless rococo style
succeeded the heavy imitations of French pseudo-classic furniture. Instead
of, as in the earlier and more tasteful periods, when architects had
designed woodwork and furniture to accord with the style of their
buildings, they appear to have then,